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Re: 10 Years of Human Occupation

Thank you for this. What I don't understand is that it took so long to build (is it complete?) the ISS, now there is talk of scrapping it!!! WTF??? I would think it would stay up there for quite some time, but what do I know.

Re: 10 Years of Human Occupation

ISS took a global effort to develop and build. It takes a lot of resources and global brain power. The cost ran up as much as 160 billion dollars. It's expensive to man and maintain and with global economy in decline, countries struggling with debts, NASA fading away as an agency, there is no interest to keep maintaining it beyond the projected operational years.

Re: The Astronomy Tower

Originally Posted by WaGWaG

I love this last one, it's like standing on the edge of oblivion.

A shuttle astronaut who'd stood on the end of that arm gave a lecture at a university science class I attended. Someone asked him how it felt to stand up there, and he said that once he got set and looked around, he was over the Pacific Ocean, and it was like standing on the world's highest diving board, and the urge to just bounce and dive was overwhelming.

Originally Posted by Edward Twinkletoes

They've got no business up there. This shit needs to be defunded and shut down.

Absolutely. And Columbus had no business sailing across that ocean to a new world. And the British had absolutely no business settling another continent, or the Spanish or Portuguese, for that matter.

Explanation: The robotic Cassini spacecraft now orbiting Saturn drifted in the giant planet's shadow for about 12 hours in 2006 and looked back toward the eclipsed Sun.
. . . .
Far in the distance, at the left, just above the bright main rings, is the almost ignorable pale blue dot of Earth.

Talk about perspective...

It brings to mind a Bible verse that I've associated with space exploration for a long time: "What is man, that You care about him?" We live on such a tiny little place!

Originally Posted by RaKroma

ISS took a global effort to develop and build. It takes a lot of resources and global brain power. The cost ran up as much as 160 billion dollars. It's expensive to man and maintain and with global economy in decline, countries struggling with debts, NASA fading away as an agency, there is no interest to keep maintaining it beyond the projected operational years.

If I were as rich as the Koch brothers, I'd make an offer on it.

"Thirty-one* states allow all qualified citizens to carry concealed weapons. In those states, homosexuals should embark on organized efforts to become comfortable with guns, learn to use them safely and carry them. They should set up Pink Pistols task forces, sponsor shooting courses and help homosexuals get licensed to carry. And they should do it in a way that gets as much publicity as possible. "

Re: The Astronomy Tower

Originally Posted by WaGWaG

I can only imagine. What class was it for? Do you remember the astronaut's name? Thanks so much for sharing that story Kulindahr, I'm always wanting to hear some personal insight from the men and women who have actually been up there. What a cool experience!

The class was called "Rocks and Stars", a kind of physical science overview course aimed at fraternity and sorority people who needed a science course. I took it because it had a reputation for being fun. Less than half the sessions were taught by the professor; we got visiting professors, two different guys from JPL, a British Petroleum geologist, a geologist from the Mt. Saint Helens monitoring group, an earthquake guy from U Cal, a minerals geologist from somewhere, that astronaut, and more.

I can't remember his name, but he packed the place -- the auditorium was definitely far over legal occupancy.

"Thirty-one* states allow all qualified citizens to carry concealed weapons. In those states, homosexuals should embark on organized efforts to become comfortable with guns, learn to use them safely and carry them. They should set up Pink Pistols task forces, sponsor shooting courses and help homosexuals get licensed to carry. And they should do it in a way that gets as much publicity as possible. "

Re: The Astronomy Tower

This video shows how the sun's surface changes over just an hour's time. This was taken in 2006 by the Vacuum Tower Telescope in the Canary Islands of Spain.

Kool.

I remember studying the physics of solar prominences. Wish we'd had movies like this to make it easier to visualize!

We even got assigned a sci-fi story -- it was about energy beings that lived in the sun's surface, where they were subject to the violence driven by the magnetic fields. It ended with one making a suicidal leap to escape a rising flare that would have torn him to oblivion. It gave a different perspective.

"Thirty-one* states allow all qualified citizens to carry concealed weapons. In those states, homosexuals should embark on organized efforts to become comfortable with guns, learn to use them safely and carry them. They should set up Pink Pistols task forces, sponsor shooting courses and help homosexuals get licensed to carry. And they should do it in a way that gets as much publicity as possible. "

Re: The Astronomy Tower

I can't wait till we can go up and see some of this for ourselves...

"Thirty-one* states allow all qualified citizens to carry concealed weapons. In those states, homosexuals should embark on organized efforts to become comfortable with guns, learn to use them safely and carry them. They should set up Pink Pistols task forces, sponsor shooting courses and help homosexuals get licensed to carry. And they should do it in a way that gets as much publicity as possible. "

Re: The Astronomy Tower

That is astounding!

I LOVE it.

"Thirty-one* states allow all qualified citizens to carry concealed weapons. In those states, homosexuals should embark on organized efforts to become comfortable with guns, learn to use them safely and carry them. They should set up Pink Pistols task forces, sponsor shooting courses and help homosexuals get licensed to carry. And they should do it in a way that gets as much publicity as possible. "

Re: The Astronomy Tower

I missed the eclipse -- we got fogged in and then clouds came over. I would have had to drive an hour and a half to see it, which would have meant almost no sleep that night.

But those pics bring back memories of an eclipse party by a pool, where two of us decided we'd tread water all through totality -- and we ditched our shorts for the event.
Treading water naked is a very unique thing. Treading water naked with a drink in one hand while watching the moon turn its angry red shade. Its mood was ominous, ours was frivolous.

"Thirty-one* states allow all qualified citizens to carry concealed weapons. In those states, homosexuals should embark on organized efforts to become comfortable with guns, learn to use them safely and carry them. They should set up Pink Pistols task forces, sponsor shooting courses and help homosexuals get licensed to carry. And they should do it in a way that gets as much publicity as possible. "

Re: The Astronomy Tower

Ha ha, great story. There's nothing like a lunar eclipse and there's nothing like skinny dipping. I haven't had the pleasure of combining those two things, it sounds like quite an experience.

The real 'experience' was keeping the drink out of the water and actually drinking it while treading water. I don't remember how long totality was, but it seemed like hours.

"Thirty-one* states allow all qualified citizens to carry concealed weapons. In those states, homosexuals should embark on organized efforts to become comfortable with guns, learn to use them safely and carry them. They should set up Pink Pistols task forces, sponsor shooting courses and help homosexuals get licensed to carry. And they should do it in a way that gets as much publicity as possible. "

Re: 10 Years of Human Occupation

The Monday before last (12/6/10), this long filament--which is the darker strand you can see at the beginning of the video--exploded. The filament had formed a week before the eruption. A coronal mass ejection occurred as a result of this explosion, throwing plasma into the solar system.

You see the ejection of plasma at about the 0:08 mark. If that ejected body of plasma hit our atmosphere, auroras would have occurred, which wasn't the case with this event. I just thought I'd share it with those interested, it's so fascinating to me.

All of this was observed by SDO (Solar Dynamics Observatory), which is an Earth orbiting spacecraft that was launched only this past February. The images were collected in the spectrum of ultraviolet.

Fun fact: The red elements seen in the video are the "cool" solar plasma ranging in temperature from 60,000-80,000K while the yellow/orange elements on the surface are the nearly 1 million K "hot" plasma. Maybe not such a fun fact, depending on who you are, but interesting nonetheless.

OMG! I thought it farted...

I can't believe I haven't seen this thread before. Thank you, WagWag!

"It looks like I've already walked out of the desert of my beginnings, alone. / I want to remain as myself, till the day I turn to ash."

Re: The Astronomy Tower

"Thirty-one* states allow all qualified citizens to carry concealed weapons. In those states, homosexuals should embark on organized efforts to become comfortable with guns, learn to use them safely and carry them. They should set up Pink Pistols task forces, sponsor shooting courses and help homosexuals get licensed to carry. And they should do it in a way that gets as much publicity as possible. "

Re: The Astronomy Tower

Oh but these pictures are magnificent. Here's a couple more for you.

First, the deservedly famous (but which not everyone may have seen): "Pale Blue Dot":

Of this image Carl Sagan said:

"From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of particular interest. But for us, it's different. Look again at that dot. [...] On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam."

(However, the "beams" are not sunbeams, but artifacts of the imaging process which required a long exposure.)

And secondly, this desert-like place, which could be in the Australian outback:

is in fact the surface of Mars. Think about it - you are looking right now, at the surface of another planet. If that doesn't fill you with a shiver of wonder, then nothing will.

-T.

"Thank God for tea! What would the world do without tea? how did it exist? I am glad I was not born before tea." (Sydney Smith)

Re: The Astronomy Tower

Originally Posted by WagWag

Cygnus-X

Cygnus-X is the largest star-forming region in the Milky Way galaxy. This is a deep infrared image of that region. What's visible are bubbles of gas that are inflated by the winds created from stars soon after they've been formed. It's theorized that these bubbles can collide with others and create enough density to gravitationally collapse into more stars. It should be noted that the hottest regions in this image are in blue. You can see a full resolution image of Cygnus-X here. It's beautiful.

I saw that on the wall of a church once during Christmas. With the reds and greens and whites, they called it "God's Christmas display".

I liked it better than the usual Nativity display.

"Thirty-one* states allow all qualified citizens to carry concealed weapons. In those states, homosexuals should embark on organized efforts to become comfortable with guns, learn to use them safely and carry them. They should set up Pink Pistols task forces, sponsor shooting courses and help homosexuals get licensed to carry. And they should do it in a way that gets as much publicity as possible. "

Re: The Astronomy Tower

Right, last picture for me before I head off to work (it's morning in Australia). This is a picture of the "Sloan Great Wall", so far the largest structure found in the observable universe, and is 1.37 billion light years across. It's a "filament" of galaxies; that is, every tiny dot in this picture represents a galaxy (like our own Milky Way):

The extraordinarily huge size and scale of this structure can be described in numbers, but it's almost impossible to understand something of this magnitude because we have no frames of reference for it. Anyway, it's staggering.

-T.

"Thank God for tea! What would the world do without tea? how did it exist? I am glad I was not born before tea." (Sydney Smith)

Re: The Astronomy Tower

Originally Posted by teadrinker

Right, last picture for me before I head off to work (it's morning in Australia). This is a picture of the "Sloan Great Wall", so far the largest structure found in the observable universe, and is 1.37 billion light years across. It's a "filament" of galaxies; that is, every tiny dot in this picture represents a galaxy (like our own Milky Way):

The extraordinarily huge size and scale of this structure can be described in numbers, but it's almost impossible to understand something of this magnitude because we have no frames of reference for it. Anyway, it's staggering.

-T.

Can you imagine what the night sky would look like in one of those galaxies where they're all clustered? Pinwheels and spiral everywhere!

"Thirty-one* states allow all qualified citizens to carry concealed weapons. In those states, homosexuals should embark on organized efforts to become comfortable with guns, learn to use them safely and carry them. They should set up Pink Pistols task forces, sponsor shooting courses and help homosexuals get licensed to carry. And they should do it in a way that gets as much publicity as possible. "

Re: The Astronomy Tower

If you folks have been paying notice to the night sky, then you'll probably have see two very bright objects very close by. Venus and Jupiter. The closer Venus outshines the more distant Jupiter, in the West in the evening sky. I've had some glorious views of this conjunction.

Re: The Astronomy Tower

Except outer space... I'm not sure why, but thinking about it gives me the heebie jeebies!

I would love to be there -- get into lunar orbit, step out in a space suit, and tell them to loop around the moon once and come back for me.

Though I'd like it more if we could build an elevator to orbit, or skyhook, or orbital tower -- whatever you want to call it. Getting to orbit would be like riding a train, and the view...!!!

"Thirty-one* states allow all qualified citizens to carry concealed weapons. In those states, homosexuals should embark on organized efforts to become comfortable with guns, learn to use them safely and carry them. They should set up Pink Pistols task forces, sponsor shooting courses and help homosexuals get licensed to carry. And they should do it in a way that gets as much publicity as possible. "

Re: The Astronomy Tower

Originally Posted by star-warrior

If you folks have been paying notice to the night sky, then you'll probably have see two very bright objects very close by. Venus and Jupiter. The closer Venus outshines the more distant Jupiter, in the West in the evening sky. I've had some glorious views of this conjunction.

I've been watching. One night, if I stood in just the right place, they looked like two bright ornaments on a neighbor's tree. Another night, they "sat" as bright spots on a hilltop. But most awesome was a night when they hung together between two glowing cloud layers.

I SO wish I had a camera!

"Thirty-one* states allow all qualified citizens to carry concealed weapons. In those states, homosexuals should embark on organized efforts to become comfortable with guns, learn to use them safely and carry them. They should set up Pink Pistols task forces, sponsor shooting courses and help homosexuals get licensed to carry. And they should do it in a way that gets as much publicity as possible. "

Re: The Astronomy Tower

If folks haven't already discovered the Stellarium, then get this wonderful free piece of software and enjoy the night sky at any time.

Moreover, you can set the view from your own longitude and latitude, as well as change the date to see past and future sky appearances. It's open source, free software, available Linux, Macs and Windows.

Re: The Astronomy Tower

Originally Posted by star-warrior

If folks haven't already discovered the Stellarium, then get this wonderful free piece of software and enjoy the night sky at any time.

Moreover, you can set the view from your own longitude and latitude, as well as change the date to see past and future sky appearances. It's open source, free software, available Linux, Macs and Windows.

I like it because on nights when there's cloud cover (one in five nights being clear is a treat at this time of year) I can see what the sky would look like if the clouds went away.

It makes me appreciate an old native American prayer my sister turned into a small poster with calligraphy:

Oh you
you there up in the sky
don't you ever get tired
of having cloud
between you and us?

"Thirty-one* states allow all qualified citizens to carry concealed weapons. In those states, homosexuals should embark on organized efforts to become comfortable with guns, learn to use them safely and carry them. They should set up Pink Pistols task forces, sponsor shooting courses and help homosexuals get licensed to carry. And they should do it in a way that gets as much publicity as possible. "

Re: The Astronomy Tower

^ OMG, a gargantuan monster is rising out of Jupiter to eat Io!

"Thirty-one* states allow all qualified citizens to carry concealed weapons. In those states, homosexuals should embark on organized efforts to become comfortable with guns, learn to use them safely and carry them. They should set up Pink Pistols task forces, sponsor shooting courses and help homosexuals get licensed to carry. And they should do it in a way that gets as much publicity as possible. "

Re: The Astronomy Tower

Hey! I think I have a star system under my bed!

"Thirty-one* states allow all qualified citizens to carry concealed weapons. In those states, homosexuals should embark on organized efforts to become comfortable with guns, learn to use them safely and carry them. They should set up Pink Pistols task forces, sponsor shooting courses and help homosexuals get licensed to carry. And they should do it in a way that gets as much publicity as possible. "